Note 30 — FOLK TALES.

It was also a custom in other times for old women to go about asking charity, and if infirm, they were carried about from house to house and villages, and whoever was last in a township to finish the reaping of his corn had to maintain one that year, and the same thing might happen to him the next year. When the run-rig system was common, the last furrow of corn was sometimes left standing as no one could be got to own it, through fear of having to keep the old woman for a year.